The multi-layered command centre inside NERV's headquarters was carefully coordinated chaos, as was usual when an angel's presence had just been detected. People rushing in to take their place, ever new updates running through the computers, sounds of news reported to others in a shouting voice.
By now, it was a well oiled machine, despite all appearances to the contrary. And in the midst of at all, on the large central layer, stood Colonel Misato Katsuragi, staring from her position at the gargantuan holographic map in front of the command centre's many levels. She knew the routine, but as always, her heart was now enflamed. It seemed angel attacks were the only time she could feel genuine passion, instead of just fake cheeriness.
The map showed the location where they had detected the Pattern Blue: In Gotemba, just outside the mountains around Tokyo-3 (in truth, the large caldera of a long inactive volcano) to the northwest. After Second Impact, the city had been turned into a commuter town for Tokyo-3's construction crews, but after the conclusion of the project, the population had been evacuated into the fortress city- for exactly this eventuality. Now, it was a ghost town.
NERV of course had known that Tokyo-3 would draw in all angels, and they had known they wouldn't be able to defend everything. That was the purpose of having a fortress city, after all. Thus, of all settlements formerly around the caldera, only Odawara to the east was still standing, as it housed the naval bases of JSSDF and UN Forces, and even then it was reduced to a small port and garrison town. Everything to the south was flooded, evertything to the west had been evacuated, and to the north was only ever more mountains anyway.
"Still no visual of the angel?" she asked Maya. For once, her direct superior, Ritsuko, was not standing behind her. Instead, the faux-blonde was busy at another terminal, overseeing the activation of the EVAs.
The short-haired woman shook her head. "No, ma'am. But we have confirmation now that it is subterranean. The signal's increase in strength probably means it is burrowing its way up."
Misato nodded. That was new, but at least that burrowing process was giving them ample of pre-warning time.
"Pilot Ayanami has just arrived at the GeoFront," a bridge tech reported from a neighbouring console.
Misato nodded at him. "Good."
Mari was already standing ready to enter the entry-plug, of course. She would pilot Unit 02 now. Asuka's old unit... But it made only sense. Using Unit 00 had only been an emergency solution at first. Unit 02 was the more combat capable Evangelion of the two.
Some minutes later, Misato heard Rei's monotonous voice through the comms, "Unit 01 ready."
So speedy. So simple. Sure, she had had to endure some of Mari's usual comments again, but even if Mari would snark about it, both girls would do as ordered. It was all so very much easier.
Misato's heart sank when the next thought hit her. Only the two pilots I was responsible for didn't turn out like that. There was something there, something to think through, but for now, Misato had a job, and for her, there literally was nothing more important in the world than this one task.
"How's it looking?" she asked Maya.
"If our estimations about the relation between signal strength and distance to surface are correct, the angel will emerge in about twenty minutes at current speed," Maya reported. "Which allows us to pinpoint his likely exit point... right here."
She added the point to the floating holographic map. Somewhere on the western outskirts of Gotemba. That was good - the side facing away from Tokyo-3. Misato pushed a few buttons on Maya's console, and now the holographic projector showed an image of the area.
Gotemba had always been a suburban town, with positively rural outskirts. Now all was abandoned, of course, and its former centre even looted and partially demolished. But out here, the buildings were still in pretty good condition, just with no inhabitants. Sparse single houses along a narrow road, like you would find in the countryside, surrounded by fields, now long since fallow. Still picturesque despite it all.
"Right. Enough time for a forward deployment," Misato reasoned. She activated the comms. "Rei, Mari. You will be transported to the western flank of the mountains. The enemy will try to pass into the city there." So far, every angel had made a straight beeline for the Geofront, or at least until they had encountered an Evangelion.
"Understood," Rei confirmed.
"A bit of hide and seek in the woods, hm?" Mari remarked, and then she giggled wildly.
Misato sighed. She knew that Unit 02 would already be following the order despite the comment. No moping from Shinji, no protests from Asuka. Despite Mari, things were more professional. And she genuinely enjoyed that. And yet...
It would be the first angel fight without either of them. It was... unusual. She knew she had to focus on the angel, but... Will I ever get used to it without... without...
She did not dwell on what she was feeling. On those pangs of guilt. She had an angel to kill.
Rei felt like swimming in a sea of doubt. No matter where she went, no matter what she was doing, even no matter of other urgent concerns she should pay attention to... all was tinged with that ever present feeling of doubt.
She had asked Shinji to stay, despite everything, just as she had told the Commander she would... only for her to then tell him to decide on his own. She just could not stick to any decision herself. If she hadn't asked him, and he then left, that would have been miserable. But if she asked him and he would suffer for it, that would be miserable as well.
And now it was entirely out of her hands, just as everything about her life had always been, ever since her first days. She should be used to that, but given what was at stake she could not stop thinking about it. It made her nervous and distracted, feelings that for years had always been drowned out by the psychopharmaceuticals.
As she entered the changing room, she heard some lyrics being sung along.
Way out in the water
See her swimmin′...
"...Hey, Kitten!"
Rei turned her head. Mari had interrupted her humming as soon as she had spotted her. Already in her own pink and white plugsuit, it seemed she had just stayed in the changing room. Rei held no negative feelings against her fellow pilot, and the manga collection she had gifted her had been entertaining, but right now she felt she just didn't have the capacity to deal with her colleague. Her thoughts were too filled up with other things.
So she did what came naturally to her, the same routine she had always done for years: She just ignored Mari, opened her locker to see if the plugsuit was there, and started undressing.
"Say, how's the Puppy? How's the Princess?" Mari simply went on, apparently unfazed by the lack of attention given to her. "I swear, nobody's talking to me anymore!"
Rei ignored her. After having gotten out of all of her clothes she began to fold them neatly.
"Come on, Kitten! Someone around here needs to spill the tea." That at least got Rei to turn her head around and look at Mari. "Uh... you know. The gossip. The news."
Rei began stepping into the plugsuit. She would have liked to be left alone with her thoughts, but the new pilot of Unit 02 was still... agreeable. "I don't know," she hence answered.
"Oh come on, what? What do you meeeaan, you don't know?" Mari continued her questioning in an almost breathless manner.
"I have received little news about Pilot Shiknami," Rei said. "And I do not know how Shinji will decide after this angel attack." She had an inkling, of course. He had told her he would pilot, for her. But that was after she had made it all but impossible for him to say otherwise. And she would have liked for him to have his freedom.
"I heard about that, at least," Mari answered. "He gotta choose, right? Full on pilot or leaving Tokyo-3. They really want to shove him into that entry plug, don't they? Has Commander Pedobeard said anything about that?"
Rei just... ignored Mari's nicknames. "He seemed very insistent that Shinji should pilot."
"Iiinteresting," Mari muttered. "And the guy still doesn't know how to decide?" She sighed dramatically. "Poor, confused puppy."
Now in her plugsuit, but not yet fully zipped up, Rei turned, almost whirled around and looked at Mari with hard eyes. It just felt wrong to the blue-haired girl that Shinji should get blamed for her failure. "He knew. He would have left today. I..." She stopped.
"Yyyyouuuu...?" Mari drawled with a teasing smile.
"He might go on piloting," Rei simply said. "For me". Now fully in her plugsuit, she turned to leave without another word.
"Hey!" Mari ran after her. Outside the dressing room, she caught up to her side again. "You know... there is a way how we can avoid that he has to fight again."
That made Rei stop, and just look at her colleague.
Mari grinned. "He can't fight angels if we have killed them all first." She grabbed Rei's upper arm. "You know in those..." She stopped. "Well, you probably haven't touched the mecha manga... have you started some of the shonen manga?"
Rei nodded, and Mari continued, "You know how they go on and on about their motivations, reason to fight this, reason to fight that, blah blah?" Again, Rei nodded. There had been a clear pattern to those booklets. Mari grinned. "Well, I guess you do have a pretty strong reason to fight now."
"To keep Shinji out of it," Rei mused. Her heart beat faster. A ray of hope seemed to shine through her sea of doubt. Even if Shinji stayed and had to fight again, there was something she could actually do to help him...
"To protect the puppy." Mari began dragging at Rei's arm. "Let's go then. Time to defeat an angel."
Two-level houses lined a narrow, boardwalk-less street on both sides, standing closely together. In front of them, along the street, electric and phone lines were held up by masts. Some houses had little shops on the ground level, some were double houses, a few had a garden walled by little stone walls. And all of them were empty.
The houses still stood, but showed first signs of decay. The shop windows still had writing on them advertising their wares, but those wares were long gone. No car could be seen parked, no person was walking in the town. Vegetation had begun breaking up the streets, and even the houses were already adorned with green.
And all around, the never-ending chirping of cicadas. The fragile peace of a ghost town that had held for over a decade, with the houses still standing... until now.
Lines of stompy feet after stompy feet tore up the roads upon impact as a far too broad body waltzed its way through the ghost town. Wherever that body hit houses, they just crumbled, not even a slight impediment to the thing's constant, never-varying speed. Already, it had cut a line of destruction through Gotemba, and now it was making its way through its central parts.
Drones had at first flown overhead, then had descended and finally, as the thing showed no reaction, were now flying at its side, always keeping a technological eye on it: NERV's newest enemy, the sixth angel.
Misato was watching the footage intensely, and had for over ten minutes already.
"Not to disrupt a tactical mastermind or something, but do you really plan to get an idea on how to fight that angel by staring at it hard enough?"
Misato's head turned around abruptly, her fugue now shattered. Ritsuko had walked up to her, now with a slight grin on her face.
"Well, at least this angel looks more... straightforward," Misato muttered.
It had the vague overall shape of a giant centipede, with a long, hemispherical torso, but that was where similarities ended. Its black body did not look chitinous or segmented; rather its skin seemed to be made of scales in a form that resembled little wings. Its dozens of legs as well did not look insectoid; like with a centipede they were angled to the side of its lengthy torso, but except for that angling they looked like they could have belonged to a lizard - if a very, very large lizard. They certainly had small claws, instead of ending in stumps.
But most prominently, it had a neck and a head. The head was dominated by red eyes and a prominent snout of sorts. Everything looked kind of abstracted, with weird sharp angles instead of genuine biological curves, but even so Misato could not help but think that it looked like a dragon head - but not the serene head of a fortune bringing dragon of East Asia, but rather the bestial head of a destructive dragon of Europe.
"Don't jinx it," Ritsuko muttered back while looking through a readout on a board. "AT Field strength looks average or slightly below, but that was our first reading last time, too. So far, no signs of offensive capacities... well, besides the use of its massive body. Constant speed... not exactly a snail's pace, but I wouldn't call it fast, either."
"So in other words," Misato summarized. "We'll have no idea what that thing will be capable of until we reach first contact."
Ritsuko looked up and shrugged slightly. "Seems like it."
Misato activated the comms. "Enemy speed is very steady. Expected contact in... 9 minutes, 20 seconds."
"Understood," Rei confirmed.
...there was no response from Unit 02. "Mari?" Nothing. "Maaari?"
Misato switched the holographic view screen to show the inside of Unit 02... and found Mari sprawled all over the seat inside the entry-plug, feet up on the console - and apparently with headphones. How does she still manage to sneak those things in? First soda bottles, now headphones...
Misato pinched the nose of the bridge, then pushed comm volume to maximum. "Mari!"
The pilot's head jerked up. She put down the headphones, looked around and answered. "Yeahhh...?"
Misato was annoyed."Enemy contact in... just over eight minutes. Stay concentrated!"
"Yeah. I know," the girl answered impertinently. "I'm watching it on my own sensors." And with that, she put on the headphones again.
...then again, maybe Asuka wasn't the least disciplined pilot...
She sighed and shifted the view back to a map of the eastern part of Gotemba, and the mountain slopes to the east of it, with the angel marked as an angrily blinking red dot slowly moving forwards, and the two EVA units as green points waiting at those slopes. Just two units...
"How did you get in here?"
Misato's head swirled around as she heard Ritsuko's voice... and then all her movements stopped at once when she saw Kaji. "What are you doing here?" she added.
Kaji just flashed his trademark grin. "I am an official employee of NERV Europe, after all. The... ehem, your local commander thought that was good enough that I could enter the bridge."
"He authorized this?" Ritsuko muttered and looked up to Gendo's high place on the command deck. Misato, meanwhile, muttered, "Unbelievable!"
"I guess he wants to show that NERV Japan has nothing to hide," Kaji commented and shrugged nonchalantly.
Misato narrowed her eyes, and then sprung into action. Grabbing Kaji's upper arm, she dragged him into a dark corner in the wall leading up to the next higher level of the command bridge. "Nice story. I, for one, don't believe a word," she said in a low, quiet but urgent voice. "Why are you really here?"
Kaji's never-ending grin turned melancholic. "Ah well... as with every angel fight there are only two outcomes, aren't there? We either make it or not. If we do, I can see the units in action, guess our future changes. We are down to just two units, after all."
"We started with just one," Misato pointed out. "That was the original plan, in fact. Most fights we have had two units at best, and it was enough." That was what she had kept telling herself all day.
"Yeah, and the original plan proved woefully insufficient," Kaji pointed out. "Look, I don't want to argue. I'm just saying, future fights, if we come to that, will look a lot like this one, so there is something to observe. Also, Mari's behaviour. You've heard Asuka's comments about her. There's something odd about the girl..."
Misato sighed as she realized matters. "...and that's your current obsession."
Again, a nonchalant shrug from Kaji. "It's my current angle, let's say. And of course, there is also the possibility we don't make it. In which case..." His melancholic grin returned. "What better place to spend my final hours than around you?"
Finally, Mari was piloting an Evangelion again. And what a fine unit it was! She had gone from a jury-rigged model built by people largely kept in the dark by NERV Japan, to the unrefined prototype model... and now the fully fleshed out production model.
She was going to miss Unit 00, actually. The model had been... very cooperative in the last fight. It had taken some negotiations with the Unit, but she had been able to do incredible things then. She doubt this one would be as receptive... but it didn't matter. Mari was not one to dwell on those things. This unit was new (to her) and exciting, and she now had the chance to fight again, and that was all that mattered.
Right now, she still had... checking instruments... six minutes until contact. Enough time to lean back in her seat and finish this song. She knew how this all was done. Unit 02 stood high and alert, while its pilot lounged in the entry-plug inside. One just had to know how to deal with these machines.
Across a vast intersection, Unit 01 stood in a similarly rigid and alert position. Mari had no doubt that inside that entry-plug, Rei was mirroring that sentiment. They had been deployed at the very eastern end of Gotemba, and were now standing where the former National Road 138 was meeting a major street. Behind their back was a fishing pond, strangely enough, and a neighbourhood of mansions and expensive houses that eventually ended in a golf course and the mountains going up to Tokyo-3 - all abandoned now, of course, but it still set the battlefield.
The rationale was simple: They would enter a first engagement here, and if things turned south they could go up the mountains and use the heightened elevation to make a stand. At least, that was the plan. Mari still snickered about the whole concept. Having plans against angels was sort of like trying to empty the ocean with a spoon. Technically productive, but...
Mari dropped the headphones when it was two minutes remaining until contact. Instead, now she bent over forward, hands on the console, and started grinning. From one moment to the next, the anticipation for battle became nearly unbearable. Behind several shopping malls that clustered here at the eastern end of town, dust rose in the air, heralding the angel's arrival.
...and then it came around the corner. It's strangely rigid neck full of angled lines, its draconic head and most of all, pair after pair of legs relentlessly moving on.
"Alright, ladies." That was Misato over the comms. "You know the drill. Open fire. Let's see if that will have an effect. Do not engage in melee for now; you have plenty of space to fall back to and the angel doesn't appear to be the quickest."
Rei affirmed the order but Mari simply raised Unit 02's pallet rifle and began firing. Soon, the fire was joined by Unit 01 as well.
The head of the angel was soon engulfed in a stream of bullets... but, almost predictably, they didn't have any effect at all. The angel just kept on moving on, with not even a change in speed.
NERV had had plenty of time to prepare that deployment. The whole mountain slope was full of energy trucks and weapon caches - and even more EVA-scale weapons were scattered all around their deployment area on the intersection. So, Mari didn't even bother reloading. She fired, dropped the pallet rifle and picked up the next one. A veritable hailstorm of bullets landed on the angel, but still, with no effect.
"We're registering an AT field spike every time he is under fire," Ritsuko commented.
"That explains it," Mari snarled aggressively. "The fucker is cheating."
"Alright," Misato commented with a suppressed sigh, "Time to go for the heavier..."
But Mari hadn't even awaited that order. She had already taken up two rocket launchers, and was now firing one after the other. Both rockets exploded upon impact on the angel's torso, but it just kept going.
"Minimal damage," Ritsuko reported. "The blast got through, but the damage was almost immediately regenerated."
"Regeneration as well?" Mari exclaimed. "Why not toggle Invincibility mode while the thing is at it!"
"We might need to reduce distance," Rei said. Suddenly, everyone was quiet. Rei had made a suggestion. "At this distance, we don't seem to erode the enemy's AT field enough."
"Hah!" Mari laughed. "Girl got the spirit."
"Agreed," Misato answered, "but not yet. Regeneration and AT Field spikes were in fact new information. We need to probe what else the angel has in reserve. Fall back gradually as planned, and keep it under fire."
Mari groaned. She wanted to fight that thing. Now that it was in combat distance, she wanted to go there and punch it. Its continued presence was almost a mockery to her, a constant reminder that she had to fall back, had to keep to boring tactics, while it could just advance and advance and advance...
Grudgingly, Unit 02 walked backwards while periodically keeping up fire. Unit 01 had already done the same. The absolute eastern most end of Gotemba, right at the mountains, beyond the malls and commercial areas, was, paradoxically, a neighbourhood of mansions and expensive houses. National Road 138 made a bow around it, to get enough altitude for crossing the mountain range. Instead, the houses were connected by something barely better than a forest path. Unit 01 tried to stay on that path... while Unit 02's slow retreat leveled one mansion after the next.
Unit 02 stopped its fire, and instead drew its boomerang from a new "belt" compartment. For a second, the Evangelion stood still as Mari aimed, and then the boomerang was let loose. It flew in a wide bow to the angel, hit its exterior with a loud clang, and returned - but there was no visual damage to the angel.
"Damn it!" Mari shouted. "That idiot is destroying all my fun!"
Further aggression built up within her, tapped into her hidden reserves of anger and resentment. With all that had been done to her, this was supposed the release for it. If only they would let her!
"No further effects yet," Misato observed. "Reduce combat range."
Finally!
Unit 02 squatted down and then jumped forwards, helped by a short burst of its jump jets. While still in the air, she opened the compartments in her pylons. Whips of solid light emerged, a copy of Shamshel's weapon. As Unit 02 came down towards the ground again, the angel was struck incessantly by both whips, from a distance just outside classical melee.
And it seemed to work! Those wing-like scales, Unit 02 whipped off one after the other at the creature's neck - only for another layer of them to appear. But still, progress!
Unit 02 hit the ground again exactly a top a large-ish mansion, which now crumbled under its feet. Now standing to the side of the angel's neck, Mari continued her whipping maneuver. Inside the entry-plug she had a large, manic grin on her face. She got almost entirely lost in this path to victory - or so it appeared to her, at least. So lost that she didn't notice how suddenly blue electric arcs began to play around the beast's.
"Mari!" That was all Misato had the time to still shout.
The electric arcs went along the plasma whips, right up Unit 02's pylons - and a second later those exploded. Mari screamed.
She still managed to instinctively jump back, but she could not help but grab her own shoulders. They were still there, but they felt like they had just burst. But it made no matter. They had prepared her for that. Oh, how they had prepared her. Pain was a momentary distraction, nothing more. Pain didn't matter. Only the fight did.
"Okay, plasma is out," Ritsuko said tersely. "The angel can manage to induce a disastrous feedback in plasma structures."
Mari didn't care for any analysis. Screaming into the sky, something that was half war cry half pain, she reached for the belt compartment again and took a small baton from it, barely larger than Unit 02's hand - but immediately, it began moving, showing tiny cogs and mechanisms. Parts of the baton shifted, unfolded, became larger... and when the Submechanically Reinversible Multimartial Utility Staff 'Aaron' was finished, it was an impressive longaxe.
Growling, Mari ran up towards the angel while swinging the axe back. Time to kill you, fucker!
"Mari! Stay back! Stay back!" Misato ordered, but the girl didn't even register her anymore. She didn't register the pain anymore, either. Nor did she register Unit 01 or the mission parameters. Unit 02 was just fine - but she was running berserk now.
The axe hit the angel. With a satisfying crunching sound, it buried itself into the angel's flesh. Scales fell off left and right, and a fountain of blood emerged from the angel's torso.
"Got you!" Mari screamed. In an instant, the axe shifted and transformed again, making it easy for the girl to retrieve the newly shaped butcher knife - with which she immediately hit again, this time closer to the neck. Another fountain of blood appeared.
Misato sighed. "Unit 00, join the melee attack."
Some distant analytical part of Mari's brain, now completely ignored, noticed that this made sense. She was disobeying Misato's orders, but it was better for a Commander to adapt to that situation rather than risk unit cohesion. Besides, it seemed Mari had proven that melee attacks worked.
Both units were now causing blood fountains all over the angel's front part. Of course, Rei only had a prog knife for the work, but it seemed even just that was enogh.
Victory. Mari could feel it. The battle trance held her in thrall completely now.
...then blue energy arcs appeared around the angel's neck again. The next thing Mari felt was pain, all over her body... and then nothing. The black claimed her.